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Life cycle assessment (LCA) is being used increasingly in decision support situations. In actual cases, the sources of uncertainty are easily hidden in the complexity. Methods for taking uncertainty into account are recommended by LCA guidelines, but actual application remains rare. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the sources of uncertainty in a practical simple selection case wherein a customer makes a decision between beer and wine in a restaurant, considering the selected criteria and the given information. The uncertainty in LCA results is connected to the broader scope of decision analysis.

Life cycle inventories were collected for beer and wine production from existing literature. The functional unit was chosen to be one serving of alcohol: beer or wine. For illustrative purposes, only the global warming potential indicator was …